


Fetch

by Winter_of_our_Discontent



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Tam Lin (Traditional Ballad)
Genre: Celtic Mythology & Folklore, Fae & Fairies, M/M, Multi, Not Season/Series 03 Compliant, Post-Reichenbach
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-06-03
Updated: 2014-03-24
Packaged: 2017-12-13 20:03:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/828295
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Winter_of_our_Discontent/pseuds/Winter_of_our_Discontent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Only Sherlock Holmes could manage to die and still be in mortal danger.</p><p>And now John Watson's going to have to rescue him. And punch him in the face. Probably in that order.</p><p>Inspired loosely by the folk ballad "Tam Lin."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

It was greatly to John’s advantage that people didn’t, as a general rule, try to break into morgues. 

And those that did generally hadn’t been let in officially often enough to know the layout and security systems. It had actually been harder to slip the cordon of paps and reporters (and Mycroft Holmes’ people, he’d no doubt) around Baker Street than to sneak into the lower levels of Bart’s at half two in the morning. 

At night the shadows spread to fill the corridors, no longer held at bay by the harsh glare of the fluorescents. John’s torch was a teaspoon of reddish light in an ocean of darkness.

He checked his watch again. Half an hour before the security guard’s next rounds. The cameras were all at the entrances; once he’d got past them the dead had precious little in the way of security. (“Never any money for the dead,” a drunken pathologist had once complained to him during his residency, “since corpses can’t vote.”)

His beam finally caught on the right drawer. John opened the latch and pulled the shelf out halfway. The slide of metal sounded obscenely loud to his now sensitized ears, and he stopped, perfectly still, for about twenty seconds, listening for any signs of movement outside the room. Nothing beyond the slight hum of the HVAC. He could have been the only living thing in the building. 

In the world.

Leaning against the drawer slightly to forestall possible movement left both hands free to unscrew and pocket the red lens filter on his torch. He’d need better visibility for this part.

John took a deep breath, steeling himself. Bodies were one thing. Bodies of loved ones another. He put the torch between his teeth and gently bit down to hold it.

Slowly, he eased the zipper of the body bag open, revealing a face, a neck, and then the angled lines of a Y-incision from shoulders to chest. He paused once he’d reached the bottom of the sternum.

The body was pale, the livor mortis concentrating all the blood along the back. The face and chest had been painted strange colours by cuts and bruises that would now never get a chance to heal, and the nose appeared to be broken. The hair had been rinsed of blood but was still a tangled mess, pushed back from the forehead. John fought the urge to reach out and try to fix it. At least as it was now it covered the cuts they’d made to remove the skullcap.

John reached into his shirt pocket and carefully removed a small flat object. It retained the warmth of his body for a few seconds before cooling rapidly in the heavily filtered air. He rubbed it with his thumb, the slightly rough texture oddly soothing.

He switched the torch from his mouth to his right hand but kept the beam on the corpse’s face. John took a moment to steady himself, taking a deep breath and counting to five as he slowly let it out. Enough stalling. He shut both eyes, then raised the stone to his left eye.

He opened his eye. 

Through the hole in the stone, he didn’t see a corpse.

He saw a roughly hewn piece of wood.

It was a fetch.

It wasn’t him.

It wasn’t Sherlock.

Sherlock was alive.


	2. Chapter 2

_Let me tell you a story._

_Once, not so long ago, a man and a woman fell in love and married. There was nothing extraordinary about this, nor were they exceptional in any other way, except perhaps in how very ordinary they were. And eventually a son was born to them, a healthy baby boy they graced with the utterly boring name of John. He grew as he should and walked when he ought to and his first word was “doggie.” And in their ordinary way, they were happy enough._

_Their happiness only grew when, three years after the birth of their son, they were blessed with a daughter, Harriet. And they loved her from the tips of her tiny pink little toes to the crown of her golden hair._

_But doting parents are not the only ones who love fair hair, and happiness, even the ordinary kind, is so easily marred._

***

John had arrived as late for the funeral as he could manage while still falling within the bounds of decency, ignoring the handful of other mourners in favour of sliding into a pew next to Mrs. Hudson. She angled her body towards him and murmured an “Oh, _John..._ ” before covering her face with a handkerchief. John wrapped a black-clad arm around her supportively.

Aside from Mrs. Hudson and Mycroft, who sat in the front row next to an older woman whose face was obscured by a hat and veil, John didn’t recognise any of the others here. The gazes raising the hairs on the back of his neck and the low murmur of whispers that had accompanied his entrance, though, suggested they knew him. Or of him, anyway.

Under other circumstances he might have felt self-conscious here, in his black wool suit bought years before at Marks & Spencer and not quite as well-fitting as it had been at the time of purchase, but he was too full of a low-simmering rage to care what any posh toffs present might be making of it. Sherlock would have noticed...would have somehow known he’d bought it for his father’s funeral with money from his mum, that John had borrowed the tie from Mike, but he wouldn’t have _cared_.

John had had no hand in the preparations, Mycroft’s minions having swooped in to handle things in a discreetly efficient fashion, resulting in this farce of a service in a tiny Gothic chapel where a (thankfully closed) oak casket was almost buried under the weight of giant bouquets of white lilies. The careful, symmetrical arrangement of the flowers suggested they’d been chosen for their stark aesthetic value rather than as expressions of grief. Sherlock was… Sherlock was colour and mess and madness, was yellow spray paint on Victorian wallpaper and night chases through London, not this cold theatrical production of mourning.

So John sat, quietly seething, while a priest in cassock and surplice, who’d clearly never actually met Sherlock, dispensed platitudes and the Book of Common Prayer in equal measure, mentioning Sherlock’s “brilliant mind” and “unlimited potential, tragically cut short” while talking carefully around topics like Sherlock’s drug abuse or his so very public disgrace and suicide. John clenched and unclenched the hand not still wrapped around Mrs. Hudson, trying to think, instead, of the songs his gran had sung to him when he was very young. _Fair Margret sat in her bonny bower / Sewing her silken seam / And wished to be in Chaster's wood / Among the leaves so green._

Even the quiet background music didn’t sound like him, to John’s admittedly untrained ear. It certainly wasn’t anything he’d ever heard Sherlock play.

It was all farce, it was the worst kind of farce- if John hadn’t known the truth it would have been tragedy as well, but as it was it was just… just farce, just _lies,_ just another erasing of what Sherlock had been, far more intimate than the one the papers had already delivered, because it was done to… well, the thing in the box wasn’t Sherlock, but it could have been, and it _wasn’t,_ and Sherlock would have hated _every bit of this_ , from the very idea of a funeral to every single choice they’d made in carrying it out. 

_Come back, Sherlock,_ John thought, a bit desperate. _Come back right now so you can rail at Mycroft and trample the flower arrangements and experiment on the thing in the coffin and deduce all of the vicar’s secrets and horrify the other attendees and make all of this STOP._

And at that moment, John couldn’t have said who he hated more: the priest, Mycroft, the press, Scotland Yard, Moriarty, Sherlock...

...because he wasn’t even _dead, _the bastard, he was putting Mrs. Hudson and Molly and Greg and all the people who cared about him through this and he _wasn’t even really dead,_ and John was the only one in the world who knew, and it _was_ tragic, and more than that, it was _absurd_...__

__At some point both his hands had returned to cover his face, and John involuntarily let out a noise like a giggle. He could feel disapproving gazes turning towards him, but it wasn’t…he giggled again, his body acting of its own volition, before the sound morphed into a strange half laugh, half sob, and from there to strange, inhuman noises he could barely recognise as coming from his own throat. His cheeks and hands were wet and his eyes stung and his body, continuing its mutiny, was now trying to fold in on itself, as though his grief and physical size had become inversely proportional._ _

__As he hunched over in the pew, at the very edge of his awareness he could feel Mrs. Hudson’s soft, thin arms and lavender scent wrapping around him._ _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> with continuing thanks to reluctantabandon and rosamund for their tireless beta efforts.


	3. Chapter 3

_Soon after little Harriet turned two, a strange change came over her. Her skin turned a peculiar shade of greyish yellow like the underbelly of a fish, she began to lose weight, and her beautiful golden hair could be found in clumps on her pillow. And she cried and cried and cried until she was too tired to cry any longer. And her worried parents took her to every doctor in the land, but not even the wisest of physicians could tell them what ailed her or how to cure it._

_Instead they hooked her up to tubes that left bruises on her fragile little arms, and took out blood and put in any number of other things. And while the doctors scratched their heads and used words with many syllables, she became frailer and frailer and frailer._

_And her family grew sadder and sadder and sadder as they watched her sicken. And little Johnny, who’d promised to always protect his baby sister, felt the icy grip of guilt wrapping tightly around his little heart._

***

Slightly over two weeks after Sherlock’s funeral (and John’s completely mortifying conduct at said funeral) a familiar black town car pulled up next to John as he was carrying bags of groceries back to the flat. If he could find it within himself to be surprised by anything, John would have been surprised Mycroft had lasted that long. He hadn’t had John ‘kidnapped’ in ages, but had probably guessed that a text, call, or visit would have been too easy for John to ignore. To be fair, he’d have been right.

Best to get it over quickly, John thought, climbing silently into the backseat and setting the groceries carefully at his feet. 

The car whisked him away to a nondescript office building where Mycroft sat behind a nondescript desk and pretended to be a nondescript government drone.

“Hello, John. Please, take a seat.”

“Mycroft,” John said, making an effort to keep his voice civil as he sat down, groceries again placed carefully at his feet. 

You look...well.” That was one of the differences between Mycroft and Sherlock: both disdained meaningless forms of social address, but Mycroft knew what they were and how to employ them. To John, that had signalled politeness. To Sherlock, it had smelt of hypocrisy. Given that John knew exactly how shite he looked, he was currently inclining more towards Sherlock’s views. He didn’t appreciate coddling, especially from Mycroft.

“Yeah, well...been keeping busy.” Which was true, and probably already detailed extensively in a report in some manila folder on the desktop. Shifts at the surgery, groceries, the gym, the firing range for some completely legal marksmanship practice... Nothing out of character for him, nothing to draw attention to himself. He couldn’t afford any more of that; not after the scene he’d created at the funeral. John needed to be seen as grieving (and oh, he’d managed that...) but still stable.

If he looked at Mycroft -- really looked -- he could see the last few weeks had left their mark on him as well. There was a slight pallor to the skin, a tightening around the eyes and mouth, a certain... something he’d never have caught if he wasn’t used to reading Holmeses. John wondered how much mourning Mycroft was willing to allow himself. Probably burying himself in his work; he seemed the sort.

John felt his anger drain a bit. It must be very lonely, being Mycroft. Sherlock, at least, had had John. Still had John. Would always have John. Mycroft had... Mycroft.

John had no idea if his thoughts were showing on his own face just then, but Mycroft was the first to look away, making a show of shuffling through files as though he didn’t have the location and contents of each of them memorized. 

He finally pulled a slim burgundy leather folio out of the stack and offered it to John. “I’ve invited you here today because I felt it appropriate to tell you, in person, that you are my brother’s sole heir.”

John had just enough presence of mind not to drop the folio.

Mycroft went on as though John’s mouth wasn’t doing its best impression of a fish. “It was deemed unwise to allow Sherlock direct access to his trust fund, in light of some of his ...youthful indiscretions. But he was able to will it as he wished, and it, like everything else he owned, is now yours. He insisted upon it.” 

“He... he _what_?” John stuttered. 

“I am, of course, the executor, and once the estate is past probate would be happy to continue managing the funds as I have done. In the meantime, you should know that the rent at Baker Street will be taken care of, should you choose to remain there.”

“He never... no, of course he didn’t say anything about it,” John said, more to himself than Mycroft. He rubbed his hands over his face, the leather folio sitting awkwardly in his lap. “You... that would be fine, thanks.”

Leaving it in Mycroft’s more than capable hands was obviously the best option; it wasn’t really John’s money anyway, will or no will. If he managed to rescue Sherlock, he could give it right back to him. And if he died in the attempt, it would be the same as if Sherlock hadn’t tried to leave it to him in the first place. It was... tidy, in a way. 

“John,” Mycroft said. When John looked back up at him, he continued, somewhat delicately, “Have you seen a… counselor?”

John let out a huff of breath. “You know I haven’t.”

“I realise Doctor Thompson’s methodology was ineffectual. But perhaps another? I’ve had my staff prepare a list of very highly rated professionals.” This time, Mycroft pulled a folded piece of paper from his inner pocket and held it towards John hesitantly, as though offering a treat to a wild animal. 

John folded his hands across his chest and sat ramrod straight. “Look, I don’t know how it looks from the outside, but I am dealing with Sherlock’s… loss in my own way, in my own time. And I don’t need your help with that.”

“My brother wouldn’t want you to…”

“Stop. Right there, stop. Just… no. You do NOT get to pull that card.” John took a deep breath. Then another. Then he counted to ten. Then he counted to ten in Farsi. “I am not suicidal. I’m only occasionally even homicidal. That was a joke by the way, ta. I am just dealing with all of this in my own time, in my own way, and I’ll thank you to leave me alone to do it.”

He stood, only just remembering to grab the folio before it slid to the floor.

“John,” Mycroft slid the piece of paper back into his pocket and hurriedly stood as well. “You have my number. Day or night, anything I can do…”

“What’s this really about, Mycroft?” They’d had one point of intersection, and that was... yeah. Surely Mycroft had better things to do with his terribly-valuable-running-Britain time than worry over one middle-aged ex-soldier.

For a few seconds, John could almost see the wheels turning, as Mycroft considered his reply. John gave his best ‘I’m Captain John Watson and I am way too tired for this shit’ stare, more out of general frustration than because he thought it would have the desired effect. 

Finally, Mycroft said, quietly, “My brother and I were not close. But despite what he may have believed, I cared for him very much. And he cared for you, very much.”

“Yeah, well, it was mutual.” John sighed. For all that he could barely stand the sight of Mycroft just now… he was still Sherlock’s older brother. “If I think of anything, I’ll call.

“Thanks for... well. Yeah.” He tucked the folio under his left arm and held out his right hand. Mycroft appeared surprised by the gesture, but returned the handshake.

“One thing...” John added as they shook hands, ”Can you call off the surveillance on the flat, or at least tone it down a bit? At this point, I’m old news to the press, and I doubt any criminals are still after me. It just seems... a bit silly. I’m of no particular interest to anyone anymore.”

Mycroft seemed reluctant, but gave a brief nod. “Of course, John.”

Under any other circumstances, Mycroft would have been the best ally he could have asked for: he had loads of connections, seemingly limitless resources, and was doubtless the only person anywhere near as driven as John to get Sherlock back at any cost. 

But how could he tell the most logical man in the world any of it? _By the way, Mycroft, your brother’s actually alive. He’s been taken away by the Fae, who’ve left a changeling body in his place. And that’s what you really buried under that fancy black marble stone. I know because I looked at his corpse through a self-bored stone and it was actually a log. And now I’m planning to travel to Faerie and rescue him._

He’d be sectioned. Unofficially, perhaps, just taken by another black car to a quiet spot in the countryside - some converted old manor house where the best medical care available would work to cure him of his delusions. It would be an act of kindness, was the least Mycroft could do for the poor man who’d clearly been so strongly affected by his brother’s suicide.

And then, when All Soul’s Night came... 

Mycroft wasn’t an enemy. But in his benevolence he had the potential to be a very dangerous obstruction. Which meant John would have to be very, very careful to not let anyone find out what he was planning.

John was halfway home before he realised while he still had the damn leather folio, he’d accidentally left his groceries behind in Mycroft’s office.

They were, of course, waiting for him inside the door at Baker Street.


	4. Chapter 4

_Johnny, you see, knew something no one else in all the Kingdom knew. Not the learned physicians, and certainly not his poor, worried parents. He knew what was wrong with dear little Harriet._

_But he’d been too scared to tell anyone. Because it was All. His. Fault._

 

***

 

“John!” Mrs. Hudson cried from the bottom of the stairs as she climbed up as quickly as she could manage. “What on earth are you…”

 

John was too busy grabbing the fire extinguisher to immediately answer; one of the benefits of living with Sherlock, for a very loose definition of “benefit,” was the array of safety equipment John had insisted on purchasing and installing around the flat. He’d been halfway to insisting on a chemical shower before… well.

 

He doused the table and surrounding areas in foam before turning around to face a very annoyed landlady. “Mrs. Hudson, I am so, so sorry…” he said, continuing to glance around for any flames he might have missed. That it also avoided meeting her eyes was an ancillary benefit. “It… got a bit away from me.”

 

“John, what on earth were you _doing_  in here?” she asked, opening the window above the kitchen sink and waving her hands ineffectually at the smoke. “I never thought I’d have to worry…”

 

She stopped, unwilling to complete the sentence. It didn’t especially matter, as they’d both known what she was about to say.

 

“Well, no body parts this time, I hope?” she asked, voice full of false cheer.

 

“Oh, no, no, of course not, I gave them all back to Molly ages ago.” And binned anything he hadn’t recognised as hazardous medical waste. And then scrubbed the kitchen from top to bottom. There was a difference between not wanting to remove Sherlock’s lingering presence and living with rotting things that even he as a doctor hadn’t been able to identify; he’d left almost everything else in the flat alone but the kitchen practically gleamed.

 

Not at the moment, of course. At the moment a significant portion of it was blackened, soggy, or blackened _and_  soggy.

 

Mrs. Hudson wandered around the kitchen as though she’d not seen it before, and John tried to remember the last time she’d been up to the flat. An odd distance had grown between them since the funeral, a space full of things neither knew how to say to the other shaped like a lanky six foot tall git in a Belstaff coat.

 

He didn’t know what to say to anyone anymore, actually. If they hadn’t known Sherlock (or worse, only knew him from the papers) he didn’t have time to waste explaining how everything they knew about Sherlock was wrong; if they’d known him and hadn’t been his friends (a category that, as far as John was concerned, applied to everyone at New Scotland Yard) he didn’t have time to waste on them because they should have known better, for fuck’s sake, and of those who had known Sherlock and were friends (a tiny category that as far as John could tell included Mrs. Hudson and Mycroft on a good day) he found himself at a loss when their grieving was so different from his own. They were mourning a death and he was… well, whatever the hell he was doing. Preparing for war, maybe.

 

“Making such a mess in my… really, John,” Mrs. Hudson said, as though John were five and had been caught making mud pies in the living room.

 

“I’ll clean it all up, don’t worry about a thing, I promise…”

 

“You’ll have to replace the curtains, I shouldn’t wonder…” She stopped mid-speech and mid-step, leaning closer to some of the bundles of herbs John had hung. “St. John’s Wort? Is that _Yarrow_? John, what precisely are you up to?”

 

John’s mouth went dry. “Just… trying my hands at some cooking.” He paused, then added quickly, “takeout just doesn’t… so I thought I’d… new recipe?”

 

“John Hamish Watson,” she snapped. “My hip may be dodgy but my eyes work just fine. As does my brain.” She turned and walked into the sitting room, settling down on what John still thought of as Sherlock’s chair. “Now, come in here and tell me exactly what it is you’re messing about with.”

 

John opened his mouth.

 

“And no lying to me, dear.”

 

John closed his mouth.

 

He took a deep breath and then let a bit of it back out in a sigh. “I’ll put the kettle on.” They both turned to look towards the still-smoking kitchen.

 

“Downstairs,” she announced, in a tone that brooked no argument. He nodded. “And _I’ll_ put the kettle on,” she added. “I’m not in a mood to let you muck about in my kitchen right now.”

 

A few minutes later found John watching absently as his landlady went through the practiced motions of making tea for two, which left his mind free to frantically race as he tried to figure out what the hell he was going to tell her. Sherlock had been right when he’d called John a horrible liar. He’d only gotten away with anything this far because he’d focused on saying the true bits and talking around everything else, but he was still crap at the sort of bald-faced lies Sherlock could tell six of before breakfast.

 

She practically slammed the cup and tray of fresh scones down in front of him. He was reluctant to try her patience further, but making a proper builder’s tea out of it and nibbling the scone did give him a few further precious seconds to collect his thoughts.

 

Dealing with bloody _Mycroft_  had been easier than this, Christ.

 

“Well,” Mrs. Hudson said, staring at him over a rim painted with roses. “Start talking. I’m not getting any younger, you know.”

 

He could twist the truth. Or ease into it somehow, or come up with a convincing lie…

 

Come on Watson, figure _something_ out…

 

“Sherlock’s alive.”

 

...or not.

 

Mrs. Hudson looked at him with this horridly concerned and pitying look, made far worse by how kind the expression was. “John… Sherlock’s death hit all of us very hard.”

 

John closed his eyes, trying to focus on the lightness that finally _telling_ someone had brought, rather than the fear he was about to bugger everything up. “I’m not… I swear I’m not mad, Mrs. Hudson. Just… just hear me out.”

 

There was literally no way he wasn’t about to sound insane, so he began speaking, going in with his metaphorical guns blazing like some James Bond action sequence.

 

He reopened his eyes, but his gaze was on a point far beyond the flat’s wall. “Moriarty is some sort of fae. Fairy. Shamming at being human. They’re not like sweet little winged Disney things, the Fae. They’re horrible, mad creatures, twisted and… and _wrong_.” Both his hands were wrapped tightly around the teacup now, blanched to match the porcelain. But steady. “They like to kidnap people… fair haired children. Musicians, artists. Beautiful people. _Clever_ people. They keep them until they get bored. Moriarty was… is… utterly _obsessed_ with Sherlock. And he’s taken him off to Faery, left a changeling body in his place to fall off Bart’s so everyone would think he was dead.”

 

He paused to wet his mouth with the tea. It was the most he’d spoken to anyone in months, and his lips and tongue felt sore with the sudden overuse.

 

“John.” Mrs. Hudson whispered, sounding horrified now, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to look at her, to see what she thought of him now. “What on earth makes you think that?”

 

“Because I… “ in for a penny, Watson... “I _knew_ there was something wrong about Moriarty. Off. Beyond being an actual evil super villain. Things he said. To me.” And he absolutely refused to think about his kidnapping at Moriarty’s hands, to dwell on the things whispered in his ears before Sherlock had arrived at the pool. “Look, I had to know for sure. So I broke into Bart’s and looked at the corpse. Sherlock’s corpse. It wasn’t. It was… twigs and bits of moss and cobwebs. Moriarty’s too.” He didn’t bother mentioning that the Westwood suit had been genuine, not a glamour, surreally wrapped around the bundles of wood like the world’s poshest bloody scarecrow. He lifted the delicate teacup and drained it the rest of the way.

 

As soon as he’d emptied it, Mrs. Hudson snatched the cup out of his hands and stared at the bottom. “Oh dear. You and Sherlock _are_ in a mess, aren’t you?”

 

“I know it sounds crazy, but… Wait, what?”

 

“You’ve got a trident, lines, challenges… If I had my deck out you’d be getting a Ten of Swords and a Tower, and no mistake.”

 

“Wait, you _believe_ me?”

 

“I told you I wasn’t an idiot. That tea had thyme and chamomile in it for truth-telling, your leaves show an awful mess, and I was born with a caul.”

 

John slumped backward in the chair, his body caught between relief and exhaustion as the tension he’d been carrying for months suddenly released.

 

“And if you weren’t such a stubborn fool and had _told me_ , I could have started helping you ages ago, you idiot man,” Mrs. Hudson said, swatting at his arm in a way that was as good as an embrace.

 

“ _Helping_ me?”

 

“Of course. You’ll need all the help you can get if you’re going to get to Faerie and rescue Sherlock. It’s not exactly a weekend trip to Brighton, you know.”

  
“Mrs. Hudson,” John sighed, “you are a _marvel_.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, been a while since the last update. Believe me, if I could write faster, I would. 
> 
> Thanks for sticking with this in spite of the long breaks, I'm still really excited about telling this story, and would, in fact, probably be writing it slightly faster if I wasn't so fussed with trying to get it perfect.
> 
> Love and thanks to analineblue and reluctantabandon for the beta on this chapter.
> 
> I'll be at 221BCon in Atlanta again this year, hope to see some of you there!
> 
> And, as ever, I can be found at bamfinacuddlyjumper.tumblr.com


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